1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus having a mounting portion for an exchangeable ink tank.
2. Description of the Related Art
Whether or not ink remains in an ink tank of an ink-jet printing apparatus can be confirmed by looking at the ink in a transparent ink tank. However, it is difficult for a user to check the amount of ink remaining in a type of ink tank which stores the ink permeated into a sponge or a porous member.
To detect the amount of ink remaining in this type of ink tank, for example there is a method which integrates the number of printing dots and calculates ink consumption from the integrated value to detect the amount of ink remaining. However, where a plurality of the exchangeable ink tanks are used, the amount of ink remaining that is detected by the above integrating method does not correspond to the ink remaining stored in each ink tank.
When a printing apparatus is used with a plurality of exchangeable ink tanks, it is considered that ink tanks with predetermined barcodes are utilized and, as a result, each of the predetermined barcodes are utilized and, as a result, each of ink tanks can be distinguished. However, since some of the ink tanks may utilized the same barcode, it may be distinguished by mistake and, therefore, it is difficult to discriminate the ink tanks with the barcode individually. In the above construction, it is difficult to distinguish whether the ink tank is brandnew and if a used ink tank happens to be mounted by mistake, control of the cartridge is left to the user.
An object of the present inventions to provide an ink-jet printing apparatus, which is able to individually discriminate an ink tank and is able to inform a user of an amount of ink remaining.
In a first aspect of the present invention, there is provided a printing apparatus having a mounting portion for mounting an ink tank and performing printing by using a printing head ejecting an ink,
the apparatus comprising:
memory for storing the information;
writing means for writing the information into an information storing portion of the ink tank;
reading means for reading the information form the information storing portion of the ink tank;
control means for setting discrimination information at the ink tank and writing the discrimination information by the writing means, and storing the discrimination information in the memory.
In a second aspect of the present invention, there is provided a printing method performing printing by using a mounting portion for mounting ink tank and a printing head ejecting an ink,
the method comprising:
storing step of storing the information in memory;
writing step of writing the information into an information storing portion of the ink tank;
reading step of reading the information from the information storing portion of the in tank; and
control step of setting the discrimination information at the ink tank and writing the discrimination information, and storing the discrimination information in the memory.